Proof of Concept: And a really easy one at that.

Here is some text with big brackets

Well, that was simple as hell. Just a combination of an h1 and two spans. A span adjusts the font-size of the h1 to 0.4em, then a vertical-align:0.3em nudges the span up until it's on the midline of the h1.

A note: If the span is given a hasLayout trigger, IE will fling the span text all the way up to the top of the h1.

Relevant Code:

The CSS

.small {font-size:0.4em;vertical-align:0.3em; color:#222;}

h1 {height:2em;font-size:3em; text-transform:uppercase; text-align:center; color:#555;}

The HTML

<h1>H<span class="small">ere is some text with big bracket</span>s</h1>